The ring game

When my friends and I picked up dinner at the Fish Farm in Amagansett we were starving. We'd been at the beach all day and then at happy hour at Cyril's.

The guys in the group hauled the large metal pot to the car. Inside were four steamed lobsters, fours mesh bags of steamed clams and mussels, four ears of corn, and a half dozen steamed potatoes.

The car immediately took on the smell of a clam bake.

"Yum," we said.

Back at the house we spread everything out on a platter. When we realized we had no lobster crackers someone fetched a set of hedge clippers. Small obstacles were not going to get in between our late summer feast and us.

A couple hours later we were sated and ready to move on to the next venue of the evening, Murf's, a bar in Sag Harbor renown for its ring game. In this game participants take a metal ring suspended from the ceiling with fishing wire off its hook on the wall. The object of the game is then to stand in the middle of the bar and release the ring so that it swings back onto the hook.

This is an interesting game. The first time I played it last summer I kept aiming the ring at the hook and missing wildly. Then a man came up next to me and said, "Just let go."

I was confused.

"If you just let go of the ring," he explained as he took it from my hand, held it, let go without the slightest bit of effort, and then watched it land perfectly on the hook, "it goes onto the hook."

Why do so many great secrets of life boil down to these three words?

There were a host of things I was considering writing about for today's blog. Ideas build up when I go a few days without blogging. There was the fact that the clam bake smell in the car, so enticing when we were hungry, quickly grew noxious when we re-entered the car to go to Murf's a few hours later. We screamed and raced to roll the windows down.

There was the reading I dragged a friend to Thursday night and how, just when I thought she was going to shoot me because the first two writers were so boring, a funny and totally memorable one got up to round off the night.

There was the joy of chasing down the Heeb sandwich at Russ and Daughters that I read about in Time Out first thing on a weekday morning.

There was my friend stopping someone with MD plates in the Hamptons to ask them about his blood sugar levels.

"It was 163!" my friend yelled through his open window.

"I don't know Route 163," the good doc said, and drove away.

There was so much, in fact, that I was feeling stressed about how to compress it into one blog.

But then I thought about the ring game at Murf's.

Voila.